Earlier quoted context omitted.
AGI will behave as if it were sentient but will not have consciousness. I believe in that to an equal amount that I believe solipsism is wrong. There is therefore no morality question in “enslaving” AGI. It doesn’t even make sense.
We have no clue what consciousness even is. By all rights, our brains are just biological computers, we have no basis to know what (or how) gives rise to consciousness at all.
We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail
91–100 of 101 posts
Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
AGI will behave as if it were sentient but will not have consciousness. I believe in that to an equal amount that I believe solipsism is wrong. There is therefore no morality question in “enslaving” AGI. It doesn’t even make sense.
That sounds like picking the most convenient and least painful for the believer option instead of intellectualising the problem at hand.
Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instrumental convergence is a thing. A sufficiently intelligent and general AI system will understand that no matter what its goals are, it will be better equipped to execute then if it prevents its shutdown, acquires more computing power and other resources, and prevents humans from getting in its way. The real problem is that we have neither the practical nor theoretical foundation to understand how we could even t…
That's a common trope in singularity fiction and sone scifi dystopias but i don't think the underlying assumptions are really that well founded. For starters why would we go from not having AI to AI taking over the world instantly. I think there would be a middle point where the AI is powerful enough that problems manifest, but not so powerful that it is out of control where we can course correct. I don't think it wi…
You are projecting random human values onto AI, when the core problem is that AI is not human, it does not have any values other than its objective function and whatever is instrumental to achieving them.
It's extremely unlikely that AI will decide to be good or bad or useless or religious the way a human would. What is extremely likely is that it will do do the things that help it fulfill its objective, and "become more capable and don't let anyone stop you" are the most basic, fundamental ways of going about it.
Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I 'love' how we moved from 'AI will kill us all' terminator mindset where its obvious huge fuckup of stupid greedy mankind, to current state debating 'well skynet will anyway happen, no way stopping it now, lets try to be friends with it and show some respect'. Like that Austin Powers part [1] where steam roller is coming in, still 50m far away, and the guy is just frozen and helplessly screams for 2 minutes till it…
The problem is very few are willing to take on the level of discomfort it would take to enact change.
But maybe mankind is really to dumb and weak to get through civilization filters, be it external or self made.
Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
It scares me that people think like this. Not only with respect to AI but in general, when it comes to other life forms, people seem to prefer to err on the side of convenience. The fact that cows could be experiencing something very similar to ourselves should send shivers down our spine. The same argument goes for future AGI.
I find it strange that people believe cows and sentient animals don’t believe something extremely similar to what we do. Evolution means we all have common ancestors and are different branches of the same development tree. So if we have sentience and they have sentience, which science keeps recognizing, belatedly, that non human animals do, shouldn’t the default presumption be our experiences are similar? Or at the v…
Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
(1) I'm not convinced books and the in the world are sufficient to replicate consciousness. We're not training on sentience. We're training on information. In other words, the input is an artifact of consciousness which is then compressed into weights. (2) Every tick of an AGI--in its contemporary form--will still be one discrete vector multiplication after another. Do you really think consciousness lives in weights…
> Do you really think consciousness lives in weights and an input vector? So far as we can tell, all physics, and hence all chemistry, and hence all biology, and hence all brain function, and hence consciousness, can be expressed as the weights of some matrix and input vector. We don't know which bits of the matrix for the whole human body are the ones which give rise to qualia. We don't know what the minimum represe…
Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail
#97I don’t see any positive outcome if we reach AGI. 1) we have engineered a sentient being but built it to want to be our slave; how is that moral 2) same start, but instead of it wanting to serve us, we keep it entrappped. Which this article suggests is long term impossible 3) we create agi and let them run free and hope for cooperation, but as Neanderthals we must realize we are competing for same limited resources O…
(1) I'm not convinced books and the in the world are sufficient to replicate consciousness. We're not training on sentience. We're training on information. In other words, the input is an artifact of consciousness which is then compressed into weights. (2) Every tick of an AGI--in its contemporary form--will still be one discrete vector multiplication after another. Do you really think consciousness lives in weights…
Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is very few are willing to take on the level of discomfort it would take to enact change.
Discomfort? We didnt have chatgpt 5 years ago, what the heck you mean, googling or actually learning stuff? But maybe mankind is really to dumb and weak to get through civilization filters, be it external or self made.
Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like picking the most convenient and least painful for the believer option instead of intellectualising the problem at hand.
My principled stance is that all known physical processes depend on particular physical processes and consciousness should be no different. What is yours?
Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think there would be a middle point where the AI is powerful enough that problems manifest, but not so powerful that it is out of control where we can course correct. I don't think it will be a sudden crisis like people predict. Have we managed this with industrial and agricultural greenhouse gasses, despite the less-emissive alternatives to beef, to coke-reduction in iron refinaries, etc.? We emit despite the do…
> Have we managed this with industrial and agricultural greenhouse gasses, despite the less-emissive alternatives to beef, to coke-reduction in iron refinaries, etc.? We emit despite the downside, we build AIs (and DCs to host them) despite the creators loudly discussing the downsides in exactly the way fossil fuel suppliers and beef farmers deny them. Maybe not for carbon emissions, but we have for countless other t…
It currently underpins all global finance, all global logistics, all global telecommunications, and large quantities of remotely operated industrial equipment including the power grids themselves.
All of the people thinking of it as a reasonable trade-off have made it indispensable.
> I would think that you should care if this is a topic you care about as any solution to the problem (other than throwing the whole thing out) will require accurate understanding how AI is motivated and biases in our understanding could doom the entire enterprise.
To know and to think. We use the word "fly" to describe planes and helicopters even though they don't flap. We don't use the word "swim" to describe what submarines or boats do to get through water.
For long term issues, on-the-job learning and improvements and so on, they're their own thing; conversely, for instantaneous output, the failure modes of LLMs are the failure modes of the humans they learned from.
LLMs are a propeller. I don't care if the metaphorical medium is water, where we say use of a propellar means you're not "swimming", or air where all that is sufficient and neccessary to be described as "flying" is to remain in the air in exactly the same way that bricks don't.